This Is Not the First Time We Hired a C-Level Businessman to Advise Our Military

On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that it is hiring Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, to run a new internal group called the Defense Innovation Advisory Board. Is there a precedent for this sort of thing? Bringing in bigwigs from corporate America can't be normal, right?

Not only is it normal; it has a pretty impressive history.

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For nearly a century, the military has hired outside experts with a knowledge base beyond that of the average officer, or even general, to help make sense of new and complex issues. During World War I, the biggest problem we faced was mobilization. When we entered the war in April of 1917, the U.S. Army had just over 120,000 men, less than the casualty count of a single battle (the nine-month-long Verdun). The armies in Europe, by comparison, had millions. We had to expand on a massive scale, and quickly. And getting men to sign up was just the beginning. Then we needed to clothe them; feed them; make guns, cannons, tanks, and airplanes for them; provide trucks that could move them cross-country and facilities to house them when they arrived.

The problem was that the Army had little idea how to go about any of this. Most officers then were trained at a time when the largest collection of their soldiers numbered in the hundreds. Just dealing with the logistics of housing and feeding an army of what would become four million men was truly staggering. Recognizing this problem immediately, the War Department (the predecessor to the Department of Defense, which formed in 1947) created the War Industries Board in 1917. Six months later, in January 1918, they hired a man named Bernard Baruch to lead it.

Baruch was a financier who'd made a massive amount of money on Wall Street. He knew corporations, and the men who led them, in a way that no military officer could compare. At the helm of the War Industries Board, he assembled a team of CEOs ("presidents," as they were then known) and Army generals who were tasked with figuring out the logistics behind the military's rapid expansion. With his expertise and connections, he was able to bring together the armaments and nascent automotive industries, and leverage the financing that was needed to supply transportation. He oversaw the process by which factories that made, say, household goods were converted to instead make shovels, tents and field kitchens. He, in other words, helped usher the military into the 20th century.

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With Schmidt, the Pentagon hopes to usher itself into the 21st. The military knows it needs to embrace cutting-edge digital technology, but doesn't have the knowledge internally how to best go about it. They need an expert that sees both its limitations and its potential.

In World War I we most needed a financier with a knowledge of enormous and complex systems, and Baruch delivered. So the federal government kept him around. He'd later go to advise Franklin Roosevelt during WWII. But in the 1920s, shortly after the war, Baruch was central to creating the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, a school in D.C. designed to give military officers an education in the issues of mass mobilization and logistics, topics which were as esoteric to military officers then as cyber technology is now. One of its graduates was an obscure Army Major, who took to heart what he learned about the intersections of industry, politics, and the military. His name was Dwight David Eisenhower.

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